


From the Top

by iciclearrow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: but im not completely sure what qualifies as a major character, there are deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:14:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23692192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iciclearrow/pseuds/iciclearrow
Summary: A serial killer lives in District Thirteen. Structure inspired by Into the Spiderverse, combined horribly with my inability to write dialogue.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

Johanna entered District Thirteen’s dining hall halfway through the time allotted on her arm schedule for breakfast. After grabbing some food, she headed to a table on the opposite side of the room that, from her position, looked like it had the most free space.

It wasn’t until she got closer to the table that she realised why—Cressida and Plutarch were sitting at it, along with Alma Coin. Johanna certainly had no more desire to talk to them any more than she wanted she wanted to talk to anyone else in this godforsaken hellhole of a district, but she knew she gets looks and questions the next time she showed up to a meeting, because she was sure Coin and Plutarch had already seen her. Coin saw everything, and Plutarch saw almost as much when it came to the former Victors.

As Johanna sat down at the far end of the group’s table, she heard them murmuring about ideas for upcoming propos. Cressida briefly glanced up as Johanna squeaked her chair back to sit in it, but her arrival was otherwise unacknowledged.

Alma was just about to dismiss the impromptu meeting when she heard a coughing fit break out from the table behind her. She turned her head, noticing Cressida and Johanna whip their heads around much more sharply than her own steady façade would allow for. At the next table, Boggs was leaning over, supported weakly by his arms as his throat coughed and choked harshly before finally giving in to its attacker and causing the man to collapse.

The president heard the shouts around her for a doctor, felt the presence of Johanna Mason coming up behind her and placing a hand on her shoulder, unable to acknowledge anything other than the fact that nothing would ever be the way it should be again.

In Johanna’s opinion, it took far too long for a doctor to make it from the clinic to the dining hall. In reality, he had only barely been too late to save Boggs’ life, but too late was still too late. The Victor hadn’t known the soldier very well due to his quiet nature, but she knew it was a loss. He had been one of Alma’s best commanders, and she knew any future fighting would suffer without his input.

Most of the discussion at the day’s Command meeting centred on Boggs’ death. Since District Thirteen had so little crime, there weren’t very many solid procedures to follow when something happened. Well, that was false. There were procedures—interrogations, autopsies, searching the crime scene for evidence, and the like—the real problem was who would carry them out, not having anyone fully trained for any specifics relating to crime scene investigation.

In the end, it was decided that Plutarch would lead the interrogations while Cressida and her camera team would document anything suspicious in the dining hall. There were a number of doctors in the clinic who were willing to catalogue anything unusual with the body, though only one, from Three, who knew enough about chemicals to test the poison and figure out when and how it must have entered Boggs’ blood stream.

It hadn’t been a slow poison—it would have needed to have been administered at some point during breakfast that morning—so Plutarch spent most of his time with the people who had been eating their morning meal with the man.

Sisters Leeg 1 and Leeg 2 claimed that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary happen. A soldier under Boggs’ command, Elbert, had briefly come by to exchange a few words before quickly moving off to another table to eat.

Finnick and Annie had seen hardly anything at all, focussed only on each other as their wedding approached. The Leegs’ conversations only a murmur, Boggs and Elbert only a blip on their radars.

Elbert himself had hardly anything to say for himself. He had asked about training modifications that day, as he’d twisted his ankle the afternoon prior and it was still sore. He’d paid no mind to the loving couple nearby and gave only a short smile as greeting to the sisters.

By the end of the day, the district was no closer to finding Boggs’ killer and were left without one of their best fighters.

Two days later, there was another murder. Elbert had found Leeg 1’s body in an unused crawlspace near the clinic. Though she’d been stabbed several times all over the torso, it didn’t appear that she had made any attempt to escape and get herself the medical attention that was only yards away.

Naturally, as the one to have found the body, Elbert was interrogated again. The doctors had determined that Leeg 1’s time of death lined up with Elbert’s story of finding her that morning on his way to the training yard after noticing a few small spots of red only the usually pristine white walls.

All of the blood found had belonged to Leeg 1, as had the few smudges of partial fingerprints left on the walls and floors of the crawlspace.

Not many in Command were entirely convinced—there were easier ways to get to the training yard than the path that Elbert had chosen, he could have returned to the area to report the murder, and he’d now been found at both crime scenes. Their only other connection was Leeg 2, being the more recently deceased’s sister, but she’d been scheduled on the opposite side of the complex all morning.

When Beetee failed to show up for the morning command meeting, Haymitch was sent to their shared room to find him strangled in his bed. Haymitch himself had spent the vast majority of the night roaming the halls, as was his usual, and claimed not to have returned to the compartment before the meeting. The only thing Cressida’s team had found that even resembled a clue was a heelprint left in the layer of dust surrounding Haymitch’s bed. However, due to the district’s clothing distribution process and only having a partial print, the true foot size could not be determined; no one was even able to definitely say whether it was Haymitch’s or not.

That left the group to speculate on the murderer’s motives and possible identity. If it had just been Boogs and Beetee, it could have been someone who didn’t like how the district or rebellion were being run, but Leeg’s death wouldn’t have had any long term effect on the decision making process, and if command had been the issue, Coin, Plutarch, or even Katniss would have been higher-ticket kills.

Based on the methods of killing so far, Boggs’ death was the odd one out. Leeg’s stabbing and Beetee’s strangling had been much more violent and direct methods of killing than poison, hinting that the killer was more likely a male than a female.

It was almost a week before Effie was found dead in a hallway near the command room, a bullet wound in her head and a bloody pillow at her side. Effie’s death seemed to bother the investigators greatly, for the most part because it felt like the killer was telling them that they knew where the decisions were being made. As it was Effie, however, it was harder to put her death down to the anti-command motive theory. Multiple members of the leadership had expressed dislike of some of her actions and decisions in the past, so unless she’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the investigation team was down a theory.

Instead, they decided to focus on who had clearance to be on the floor that Command was on. It was at this point that the team decided to rule Elbert out; having just gotten the clearance two weeks before Boggs’ death, he was now connected to so many of the murders that everyone figured that someone had to be framing him. Either that, or he was much less intelligent than they had originally believed him to be.

Through Effie’s death, they had lost the only motive and suspect that the team had been able to come up with.

Plutarch was found dead in the same place as Effie two days after her body had turned up. From this, the remaining investigators believed that Effie was not the intended target and had been attacked at the first sound of footsteps clomping down the hall, so the leadership motive was tentatively back on the table. For once, though, Elbert had a solid alibi, being scheduled on the complete opposite side of the complex all day and had been seen by at least a dozen other people at the time the doctors had deemed Plutarch had died, so at least part of their deductions from Effie’s murder seemed to be proving correct.

It was at Coin’s address about Katniss becoming the Mockingjay that the final murder attempt was made. A shot rang out from the crowd, heading for the President. Fortunately, Johanna had never been one to listen to instructions and had been in the shadows of the balcony, reflexes fast enough for to dive in the bullet’s way, getting caught in the shoulder and falling to the floor.

Even as the victor fell, heads in the crowd whipped around to the source of the sound. Coin pulled Johanna out of direct sight of the gathering area and as a doctor rushed up from the gathering area. The President walked back out onto the balcony as all eyes were finally settling on…

But that wasn’t the whole story. Let’s start this one more time.


	2. Chapter 2

Let’s start this one more time, from Johanna’a point of view.

The victor stalked back to her room after breakfast, ignoring her schedule. If the doctors couldn’t get to the dining hall to save Boggs, then she didn’t see what good her “follow-up appointment” would do. Not that they did anything at them anyway, since Johanna didn’t trust the doctors and refused to tell them anything.

She ended up blowing off the entire rest of the day, too, until Alma called her from Command and told her that if she failed to show up, then she wouldn’t be allowed over that night.

Johanna was physically present at the meeting, but barely paid attention and only contributed to say that someone was probably trying to undermine the Command staff and their undertakings. She said it more out of frustration at having to be there than actually believing it, but if there was a chance that someone would hurt Alma, then she wanted her as safe as possible.

No one took her seriously, though, and she didn’t even take herself seriously when Leeg 1 turned up dead.

Suddenly, when Beetee was found strangled in his room, everyone jumped on Johanna’s “break down Command” theory that she didn’t believe anymore. She had never really believed it in the first place. After all, the first target of a Command shut-down should have been Heavensbee or Alma or someone else who made decisions, not a soldier when they hadn’t even gotten to the main fighting part of the rebellion yet.

The woman considered joking at Haymitch to clean his side of the room more often, but the single shoe print left in the dust was oddly intriguing, like it had been left on purpose, as there were no other marks to show the walker’s path.

After a few days of radio silence from the killer, Johanna was beginning to think that whoever it had been had finished whatever it was that they had hoped to accomplish. She was the one to stumble across Effie’s body while on the way to Command, early for the meeting for once in her life. It turned out that she’d been the first one to go to the meeting room via that particular hall, and there were fortunately already people in Command, namely Plutarch and Cressida, to start doing actual investigative work.

It was faint enough that she was certain no one else would see it, but Johanna could have sworn she saw the front half of a shoe print in what must have been the only trace of dirt in the entire bunker and she walked past Effie again on her way back to her compartment.

Later in the afternoon, Plutarch brought her into an “interrogation room,” clearly just a previously unused crawlspace with a table and what appeared to be hastily cleaned up blood stains, and started spitting out questions faster than she had ever heard him speak before. “What was it that lead you to take that path to Command today?” “Have you realised that you suggest the killer is targeting Command, but don’t believe it, then maybe you do and maybe you don’t? Doesn’t that seem like it could be the killer’s pattern?” “Weren’t you at a nearby table the morning that Boggs died?” “ Don’t you also take to wandering the halls at night? Didn’t you see anything suspicious around Beetee’s compartment the night he was strangled?”

The questions kept coming before Johanna slammed her hand onto the small table between her and Plutarch and growled “Alright, I know I go unaccounted for a lot of times, but either accuse me or I’m getting out.” After giving the man a couple of moments to respond, she stalked out, his eyes gazing sadly back at her.

She turned the corner when her interrogator’s eyes dropped to her feet, which had tracked a small piece of paper from the closet into the hallway.

Johanna spent the next day’s Command meeting glaring at Plutarch and left the moment the President dismissed them. She found him dead in the hallway the day after that. At that point, she’d seen enough dead bodies for a place that was trying to end things like the Games. She stiffly reported the man’s death to the few people still meaning to attend the Command meeting before retreating to Alma’s compartment and wrapping herself in the bed’s blankets as tightly as she possibly could, hoping no one would come after her if they found out that she’d been upset with Plutarch just days before he’d been murdered.

That random soldier may have been cleared as a suspect, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t taking his place. Johanna could only hope that Plutarch hadn’t shared his concerns with anyone else in Command.

Alma herself could hardly manage to coax the victor out of the warmth of the blanket or her own arms until it was time for the district meeting, where Alma would present Katniss’ conditions for being the Mockingjay. Johanna had seemed mildly interested in what the teen would want, and she hadn’t gone to the meeting where Katniss had laid them out, so she agreed to go.

Johanna felt as if her body was flying in front of the only person she still cared about before the sound of the gunshot even reached her ears. A sharp pain exploded through her shoulder, and the last parts of her brain felt Alma’s hands on her torso, pulling her away, before she woke up in the clinic, unable to move her arm.  
The President was sitting at her side as her eyes opened, and Johanna managed to choke out “Who…”

Alma Coin opened her mouth to reply, but you’d rather not hear it secondhand. One more time, from the top.


	3. Chapter 3

The poison was, in fact, slipped into Boggs’ drink while he was talking to Elbert, both Leeg sisters smiling and the less experienced soldier fumbling over his words, the cup just out of everyone’s sight so no one could claim that they had seen the toxin go in.

Leeg 1 was wandering around the bunker, looking for her sister to go to deliver a note from Jackson to her, when she felt an arm pull her into a small space, and felt something small and cold and sharp push in and out of her several times before let go of the small piece of paper and succumbed to the pain.

Beetee woke up to hands clenching around his throat, a hushed voice hissing at him to stay silent as he gasped for breath and clawed at the fingers at his neck. On their way out, the killer pressed their heel down into the dust by Haymitch’s bed. A mark of presence, but nothing anyone would know what to do with.

Effie had truthfully been a mistake. The killer had hid, pressed against the side of the wall at a corner, waiting for Plutarch. When footsteps approached, the killer pushed the pillow over Effie’s face and shot, realising too late that she was not the intended target. Frustrated at the mistake, the figure stomped a foot, releasing the smallest bit of dirt tracked in from a brief venture above ground to practice with the handgun.

The stomp was cut short, another set of footsteps approaching from the opposite direction, and the killer swiftly and silently made its exit.

Not wanting to give it up now that the rumours buzzed about the killer targeting those in charge of the district, they once again returned to a different corner on the same floor that Effie had died on and waited. This time, the killer listened intently for the heavier, almost shuffling footsteps of the former gamemaker before pulling out the pillow and gun.

Five was enough. It was a nice number, easy to remember, and enough to cloud the killer’s true intentions.

It wasn’t, though. Command had been playing with a theory—for how long, the killer couldn’t say—that whoever was responsible didn’t care for those in charge and wanted to be rid of them. Murdering the higher-ups would likely have harsher consequences, and now that that had been brought to their attention, the killer knew there was only one path left.

Coin needed to be a sixth target, for surely, her death would cause a power vacuum in the small district, and everyone who mattered would be too consumed by the ensuing struggle to remember that there was still a serial killer among the population. Maybe they would even assume that the killer was one of those fighting for power, and whoever won would execute their former rivals as a precaution.

The logic behind murdering the President of District Thirteen was sound, but the actual plan was anything but. The killer, not knowing Alma Coin’s day to day habits like the previous victims, decided that the best time to murder her, since she couldn’t do it at a time when there were no witnesses, and having one or two witnesses would make it easy to get painted as the bad guy, would be when there was an abundance of witnesses—when there was a crowd large enough to get lost in.

Well, the plan made sense, but it’s execution left a lot to be desired by the killer. A simple walk up, stab, and walk away would have been fairly easy to hide in a crowd. A gunshot, however, was loud. The entire room turned its heads towards the source of the noise, and Leeg 2 really wished that she had thought through that part just a little better.

Leeg knew that the game was up the moment that eyes had begun finding their way to her face, mouth in a small o as she realised just how loud guns were, so she began talking the moment that whatever soldiers decided to serve as law enforcement had sat her down in a dimly lit room. She had only originally planned to kill her sister, but knew she’d need to cover up why only one of the twins had been killed or it would be obvious who had done it; all of the other murders were pure misdirection to make everyone forget that Leeg 2 was still alive.

One of the soldiers asked her why.

The girl took a moment to think it through before she told them that she had been jealous because Leeg 1 had always gotten everything better because she was “first.” She, herself had only ever gotten the second choice. It had frustrated her, and it had always frustrated her because the two had always been treated as if they were one single person instead of two different people with different wishes. She wished that they'd been seen as equal but separate individuals. And she wished that her name wasn’t Leeg.


End file.
